The Flamethrowers (2 page)

“Nevada,” I said.

“Well, now you can really learn about art.” She smiled at him as if depositing a secret between them. “If you’re with Sandro Valera. What a mentor for someone who’s just arrived from . . . Idaho?”

“Reno,” Sandro said. “She’s going out there to do a piece. Drawing a line across the salt flats. It’s going to be great. And subtle. She’s got really subtle ideas about line and drawing.”

He had tried to put his arm around me but I’d moved away. I knew how I looked to this beautiful woman who slept with half her roster, according to Ronnie Fontaine, who was on her roster himself: I was nothing but a minor inconvenience in her campaign to represent Sandro.

“So you’ll be going out West?” she’d asked before we parted ways, and then she’d questioned me about the particulars of my ride with an interest that didn’t quite seem genuine. Only much later did I think back to that moment, look at it.
You’ll be going out of town?
Reno, Idaho. Someplace far away.

When I was getting ready to depart, Sandro acted as if I might not be coming back, as if I were leaving him to solitude and tedium, a penance he’d resigned himself to enduring. He rolled his eyes about the appointment Helen Hellenberger had wrangled.

“I’ll be here getting eaten by vultures,” he said, “while you’re tearing across the salt flats, my unknown competitors drooling over you like stunned idiots. Because that’s what you do,” he’d said, “you inhibit thought. With your young electricity.”

When you’re having more than one
. I sat at the truck stop, facing that billboard, naively thinking my young electricity was enough.

Helen Hellenberger’s stable of Land Artists included the most famous, Robert Smithson, who died three years earlier while I was a student at UNR. I had learned about him and the
Spiral Jetty
from an
obituary in the newspaper and not from my art department, which was provincial and conservative (the truth in Helen’s snub was that I
did
learn more from Sandro than I had in art school). The foreman who built the
Spiral Jetty
was quoted explaining how tricky it had been to construct it on such soft mud, and that he had almost lost some very expensive equipment. He was risking men and front loaders and regretted taking the job, and then the artist shows up in the Utah summertime desert, it’s 118 degrees, and the guy is wearing black leather pants. Smithson was quoted declaring that pollution and industry could be beautiful, and that it was because of the railroad cutoff and the oil dredging that he chose this part of the Great Salt Lake for his project, where the lake’s supply of fresh water had been artificially cut, raising the salt content so high that nothing but red algae could grow. I had immediately wanted to see this thing made by a New York artist in leather pants, who described more or less the slag-heap world of the West I knew, as it looked to me, and found it worth his attentions. I went there, crossed the top of Nevada, and came down just over the Utah border. I watched the water, which pushed peculiar drifts, frothy, white, and ragged. The white drifts looked almost like snow but they moved like soap, quivering and weightless. Spiky desert plants along the shore were coated in an icy fur of white salt. The jetty was submerged but I could see it through the surface of the water. It was the same basalt from the lake’s shore, rearranged to another form. The best ideas were often so simple, even obvious, except that no one had thought of them before. I looked at the water and the distant shore of the lake, a vast bowl of emptiness, jagged rocks, high sun, stillness. I would move to New York City.

Which was an irony, because the artist himself had gone from New York to the West to make his specifically Western dreams come true. I was from the place, the hard-hat-wearing, dump-truck-driving world the Land Artists romanticized. So why did Helen Hellenberger pretend to confuse Idaho and Nevada? It was an irony but a fact that a person had to move to New York City first, to become an artist of the West. If that’s what I was going to be. Sandro declared it, “she’s influenced by
Land Art,” but this also served to explain away the fact that he was with a woman so young, with no detectable pedigree or accomplishments. Just his word.

When I was little, skiing in the Sierras, I felt that I was drawing on the mountain’s face, making big sweeping graceful lines. That was how I had started to draw, I’d told Sandro, as a little girl, five, six years old, on skis. Later, when drawing became a habit, a way of being, of marking time, I always thought of skiing. When I began ski racing, slalom and giant slalom, it was as if I were tracing lines that were already drawn, and the technical challenge that shadowed the primary one, to finish with a competitive time, was to stay perfectly in the lines, to stay early through the gates, to leave no trace, because the harder you set your skis’ metal edges, the bigger wedge of evidence you left, the more you slowed down. You wanted no snow spraying out behind you. You wanted to be traceless. To ride a flat ski as much as possible. The ruts that cut around and under the bamboo gates, deep trenches if the snow was soft, were to be avoided by going high, by picking a high and graceful line, with no sudden swerves or shuddering edges, as I rode the rails to the finish.

Ski racing was drawing
in time,
I said to Sandro. I finally had someone listening who wanted to understand: the two things I loved were drawing and speed, and in skiing I had combined them. It was drawing in order to win.

The first winter I was dating Sandro we went to the Kastles’ place up in Rhinebeck for Christmas. It snowed heavily one night, and in the morning I borrowed cross-country skis and skied across a frozen pond, made tracks that went across it in an X, and photographed them. “That will be good,” Sandro said, “your X.” But I wasn’t satisfied by those tracks. Too much effort, the plodding blobs of ski poles every ten feet. Cross-country skiing was like running. It was like walking. Contemplative and aerobic. The trace was better if it was clean, if it was made at some unnatural speed. I asked the Kastles if we could borrow their truck. We did doughnuts on the snow-covered meadow beyond the frozen pond, me spinning the steering wheel like Scott and Andy
had taught me, Sandro laughing as the truck’s tires slid. I made broad, circular tracks in the meadow and photographed those. But it was only about having a good time upstate. I thought art came from a brooding solitude. I felt it had to involve risk, some genuine risk.

*  *  *

My five minutes at the truck stop were almost up. I rebraided my hair, which was knotted from the wind and crimped in odd places from the padding in my helmet.

Drivers were arguing about truck color. A purple rig shone like a grape Popsicle among the rows of semis. A cup of cola sailed toward its grille, casting a vote with a slam and clatter of cubes. The men laughed and started to disperse. Nevada was a tone, a light, a deadness that was part of me. But it was different to come back here now. I’d left. I was here not because I was stuck here, but to do something. To do it and then return to New York.

One of the truckers spoke to me as he passed. “That yours?”

For a moment, I thought he meant the truck. But he tipped his chin toward the Moto Valera.

I said yes and kept braiding my hair.

He smiled in a friendly way. “You know what?”

I smiled back.

“You won’t look nearly so good when they’re loading you off the highway in a body bag.”

*  *  *

ALL VEHICLES WITH LIVESTOCK MUST BE WEIGHED.
I passed the weigh station, breezed through third gear and into the midrange of fourth, hitting seventy miles an hour. I could see the jagged peaks of tall mountains, stale summer snow filtered by the desert haze to the brownish tone of pantyhose. I was going eighty. Won’t look nearly as good. People love a fatality. I redlined it, still in fourth gear, waiting.

Light winked from the back of something silver, up ahead in the right lane. I rolled off the throttle but didn’t downshift. As I got closer,
I recognized the familiar rounded rear corners of a Greyhound. Builds character, my mother liked to say. She had ridden buses alone in the early 1950s, an episode just before I was born that was never explained and didn’t seem quite wholesome, a young woman drifting around on buses, patting cold water on her face in gas station bathrooms. The footage ran through my mind in high-contrast black and white, light cut to ribbons, desperate women accidentally strangled by telephone cords, or alone with the money, drinking on an overcast beach in big sunglasses. My mother’s life was not so glamorous. She was a switchboard operator, and if her past included something akin to noir, it was only the gritty part, the part about being female, poor, and alone, which in a film was enough of a circumstance to bring in the intrigue, but in her life it attracted only my father. He left when I was three. Everyone in the family said it was good riddance, and that uncle Bobby was a better father to me than my own could have been. As I approached the Greyhound, ready to pass, I saw that the windows were meshed and blacked. Exhaust was blowing out carelessly from its loose, lower panels,
NEVADA CORRECTIONS
on its side. A mobile prison, with passengers who could not see out. But perhaps to see out was worse. Once, as a kid, riding my bicycle around the county jail, I had seen a man staring down at me from his barred window. A fine-grade rain was falling. I stopped pedaling and looked up at his small face, framed by a gravity-flop of greasy blond hair. The rain was almost invisible. He put an arm through the bars. To feel the rain, I assumed. He gave me the middle finger.

“Save your freedom for a rainy day,” someone had written on the bathroom wall at Rudy’s Bar in SoHo, where Sandro and Ronnie liked to drink. It remained there at eye level above the washbasin all summer. No retorts or cross-outs. Just this blank command as you angled and turned your hands under the faucet.

I passed the bus, shifted into fifth, and hit ninety, the orange needle steady on the face of my black speedometer. I tucked down into my little fairing. I loved that fairing the moment I saw the bike at the dealership in Reno, where I picked it up. Metal-flake teal, the color of deep
freeze. It was a brand-new 650 supersport. It was actually a ’77—
next
year’s model. It was so new no one in the United States had one but me. I had never seen a Moto Valera this color. The one I’d owned in college, a ’65, had been white.

*  *  *

I’d ridden motorcycles since I was fourteen. I started out riding in the woods behind our house, with Scott and Andy, who had Yamaha DTs, the first real dirt bikes. Before I learned to ride, I’d ridden on the back of my cousins’ scramblers, which were street bikes they customized, no passenger pegs, my legs held out to the sides in hopes of avoiding an exhaust pipe burn. They were not street legal, no headlight or license plate, but Scott and Andy rode with me on the back all over Reno. Except past the front of our house, because my mother had forbidden me to ride on my cousins’ motorcycles. I held on for wheelies and jumps and learned quickly to trust. It wasn’t Scott and Andy I trusted, one of whom angled a wheelie too high and flipped the bike with me on the back (he had not yet learned to tap the foot brake, to tilt the bike forward), and the other took a jump over a pile of dirt at a construction site and told me to hold tight. That was Andy. He landed with the front end too pitched and we went over the handlebars. I didn’t trust their skills. I had no reason to, since they crashed regularly. I trusted the need for risk, the importance of honoring it. In college, I bought a Moto Valera and then sold it to move to New York. With my new life in the big city, I thought I’d lose interest but I didn’t. Maybe I would have, had I not met Sandro Valera.

*  *  *

I was going one hundred miles an hour now, trying to steer properly from my hunched position, as insects ticked and thumped and splatted against the windscreen.

It was suicide to let the mind drift. I’d promised myself not to do it. A Winnebago towing a Volkswagen Beetle was in the left lane. The Winnebago must have been going forty miles an hour: it seemed to stand
still on the road. We were in separate realities, fast and slow. There is no fixed reality, only objects in contrast. Even the Earth is moving. I was suddenly right up on the towed VW’s rear and had to swerve into the right lane. The road was in bad shape, and I went into a divot. It threw the front wheel off balance. I bounced and swerved. The front end of the bike was wobbling like crazy. I didn’t dare touch the brake. I tried to ride out the wobble. I was all over my lane and thinking I was going to wreck, and I hadn’t even gotten to the salt flats yet. But then the front wheel began to calm and straighten out. I moved left again onto the better road surface. The wobble I’d been thrown into was my wake-up call. I was lucky I hadn’t crashed. “Speed is every man’s right” was Honda’s new ad slogan, but speed was not a right. Speed was a causeway between life and death and you hoped you came out on the side of life.

I stopped for gas at dusk. The broad sky had turned a cold medium-blue with one star burning, a lone pinprick of soft, bright white. A car pulled up on the other side of the pumps. The windows were down and I could hear a man and woman speaking to each other.

The man removed the car’s gas cap and knocked the nozzle into the opening of his tank as though it required force to get it to fit correctly. Then he waggled it in and out of the tank in a lewd manner. His back was to me. I watched him as I waited for my tank to fill. When I was finished, the woman was getting out of the car. She looked in my direction but seemed not to register me.

“You made your choice,” she said. “And I’ll make mine. Creep.”

Something about the light, its dimness and the deepening blue above us, the commencement of twilight insects, made their voices close, intimate.

“You call me a creep after what you asked me to do? And now it’s nothing?
I’m
a creep?”

The man pulled the nozzle from the gas tank and jerked it at the woman. Gasoline sloshed on her bare legs. He resumed filling his tank. When he was done, instead of putting the nozzle back on its resting place on the side of the pump, he dropped it on the ground like it was a
garden hose he was finished using. He retrieved a book of matches from his pocket and began lighting them and flicking them at the woman. Each lit match arced through the dim light and went out before reaching her. Gas was dribbling down her legs. He lit matches one after another and flicked them at her, little sparks—threats, or promises—that died out limply.